The Laws of Software Process

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The Advent of Agile

Summary

The Agile approaches offer a welcome relief from process-in-the-large;

they also help to counteract the desire to make software development a

mindless, repetitive process. As their creators and proponents would hap-

pily acknowledge, they are no more silver bullets than any of the earlier

attempts at codifying software development at either the mechanism or

the organism levels. They do reassert the humanness of the business, and

have shone a bright light on an oft-neglected aspect of building systems,

which is the way that people work together.

Agile approaches, as evolutionary steps in our understanding of the fifth

knowledge medium and what it takes to make it work, do run the risk of

being labeled the next fad. Software ...